For your consideration: Boxing Day with Christmas Crackers

Dear Hipster:

With the holidays upon us, I would like to know how a hipster would deck the halls. What type of gifts might be given? What food would be served? Do hipsters do holiday tours of local Candy Cane Lanes? What do hipsters do for New Year’s Eve? Do hipsters send holiday cards in the US post or digital? Will hipsters do things a little differently in the COVID area? Will the hipster community decorate pineapples this year (like I read about last year)? Or is that too 2019? I decorated a pineapple last year. It was fun & economical. Do any hipsters celebrate European holidays like Boxing Day with Christmas Crackers, party favors, and maybe lighting a bread pudding?

—Patty M.

Wow. If I may paraphrase the infomercial guy with the magic black goo that seals holes in buckets, “That’s a lotta [questions]!” If you want the really quick, answers-only version: Lots. Plenty. Nobody, and I mean nobody, doesn’t like a good Candy Cane Lane. Drink. Yes. Probably not, knowing them. No, because yes. Good for you. Absolutely.

I’ll casually refer you to my recent column on retro Christmas hipstering, which gets you almost all the way there for some of these questions. For example, you can infer what kind of food might be served at a hipster Christmas party by deciphering exactly how hardcore the hipster in question is. Overly dedicated hipsters might stage a too-literal interpretation of the “Boar’s Head Carol” and parade around the kitchen with a severed pig’s head begged off a butcher somewhere. The kind of hipsters you actually want to hang out with are more likely to have scoured every market in the city for one of those Buddha’s hand citrons that looks like a lemon with fingers, paid whatever exorbitant rate the grocer charges for it, lovingly processed it into little hunks of candied peel, and then used that to make a convincingly authentic mince pie, which they’ll serve you with an accompaniment of hot buttered rum and homemade eggnog.

I could go either way on the subject of holiday pineapple decorating, but I doubt you’ve truly committed to the Christmas pineapple till you’ve minced that bad boy up at breakfast time on December 25 and tossed it in the blender with a can of coconut cream and enough rum to pickle a Parrothead. This approach solves your coronavirus-related question because, if you’re sitting at home drinking piña coladas on Christmas morning, then you’re probably not out superspreading coronavirus. Thus, this approach to alternative holiday decorating really punches above its weight.

As for that final bit about European holidays, I feel it is worth mentioning how, in the past decade, I have had not one, not two, but three different friends who have staged Boxing Day celebrations (at least one of which revolved around a vague fox hunting theme) independently of each other. Make of that what you will, but it seems like strong anecdotal evidence of the hipster value of celebrating random Euro holidays. I doubt they would have lit bread puddings on fire, however, because the flambéd Christmas pudding is a fruitcake-adjacent confection that is totally and completely different than bread pudding. But don’t worry, you are definitely not alone in mixing up the two things. In my book, you get credit for invoking the flambé.